“From jubilation to despair”: Representations of drink in British and Irish literature

Abstract

The theme of drink in literature has been the focus of scholarly interest for a few decades, though much of it tends to concentrate on the writers’ lives more than literature per se, particularly in the studies concerning American literature. Criticism concerning British and Irish literature mostly discusses selected periods, the works of individual writers, or concentrates on regional literature, in this last case usually in the form of annotated anthologies. This article proposes a perspective whose focal point is the paradigm shift in the literary representation of drink, from the conviviality prevalent in pre-twentieth-century literature to the harrowing depictions of alcoholism in contemporary works.